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The number of invasive alien species is increasing and so are the impacts these species cause to the environment and economies. Nevertheless, resources for management are limited, which makes prioritization unavoidable. We present a prioritization framework which can be useful for decision makers as it includes both a scientific impact assessment and the evaluation of impact importance by affected stakeholders. The framework is divided into five steps, namely 1) stakeholder selection and weighting of stakeholder importance by the decision maker, 2) factual description and scoring of changes by scientists, 3) evaluation of the importance of impact categories by stakeholders, 4) calculation of weighted impact categories and 5) calculation of final impact score and decision making. The framework could be used at different scales and by different authorities. Furthermore, it would make the decision making process transparent and retraceable for all stakeholders and the general public.
Prioritization of introduction pathways is seen as an important component of the management of biological invasions. We address whether established alien plants, mammals, freshwater fish and terrestrial invertebrates with known ecological impacts are associated with particular introduction pathways (release, escape, contaminant, stowaway, corridor and unaided). We used the information from the European alien species database DAISIE (www.europe-aliens.org) supplemented by the EASIN catalogue (European Alien Species Information Network), and expert knowledge. Plants introduced by the pathways release, corridor and unaided were disproportionately more likely to have ecological impacts than those introduced as contaminants. In contrast, impacts were not associated with particular introduction pathways for invertebrates, mammals or fish. Thus, while for plants management strategies should be targeted towards the appropriate pathways, for animals, management should focus on reducing the total number of taxa introduced, targeting those pathways responsible for high numbers of introductions. However, regardless of taxonomic group, having multiple introduction pathways increases the likelihood of the species having an ecological impact. This may simply reflect that species introduced by multiple pathways have high propagule pressure and so have a high probability of establishment. Clearly, patterns of invasion are determined by many interacting factors and management strategies should reflect this complexity.
The Editorial presents the focus, scope, policies, and the inaugural issue of NeoBiota, a new open access peer-reviewed journal of biological invasions. The new journal NeoBiota is a continuation of the former NEOBIOTA publication series. The journal will deal with all aspects of invasion biology and impose no restrictions on manuscript size neither on use of color. NeoBiota implies an XML-based editorial workflow and several cutting-edge innovations in publishing and dissemination, such as semantic markup of and enhancements to published texts, data publication, and extensive cross-linking within the journal and to external sources.
We study how species richness of arthropods relates to theories concerning net primary productivity, ambient energy, water-energy dynamics and spatial environmental heterogeneity. We use two datasets of arthropod richness with similar spatial extents (Scandinavia to Mediterranean), but contrasting spatial grain (local habitat and country). Samples of ground-dwelling spiders, beetles, bugs and ants were collected from 32 paired habitats at 16 locations across Europe. Species richness of these taxonomic groups was also determined for 25 European countries based on the Fauna Europaea database. We tested effects of net primary productivity (NPP), annual mean temperature (T), annual rainfall (R) and potential evapotranspiration of the coldest month (PETmin) on species richness and turnover. Spatial environmental heterogeneity within countries was considered by including the ranges of NPP, T, R and PETmin. At the local habitat grain, relationships between species richness and environmental variables differed strongly between taxa and trophic groups. However, species turnover across locations was strongly correlated with differences in T. At the country grain, species richness was significantly correlated with environmental variables from all four theories. In particular, species richness within countries increased strongly with spatial heterogeneity in T. The importance of spatial heterogeneity in T for both species turnover across locations and for species richness within countries suggests that the temperature niche is an important determinant of arthropod diversity. We suggest that, unless climatic heterogeneity is constant across sampling units, coarse-grained studies should always account for environmental heterogeneity as a predictor of arthropod species richness, just as studies with variable area of sampling units routinely consider area.